by Eli Hager

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Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.

Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”

Is Elon Musk a Nazi? Did the gesture that he performed in front of millions technically adhere to the standard performance of a Sieg Heil, or a Hitler salute, or a Nazi salute? Could this have been an “awkward” gesture of heartfelt enthusiasm? Did you know that the provenance of said salute was actually Roman, and first adopted by the French, then the fascists, then the Nazis, and so its historicity is really quite complex?

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None of these questions matter. What matters is that the actual Nazis are cheering. What matters is that Musk, who is currently supporting Germany’s Nazi-sympathizing AfD party, went on the world’s biggest stage and made a gesture any teenager who has seen a movie about World War II knew would be interpreted as a Nazi salute.

What matters is that Musk, like Trump before him, knows or intuits that the media is incapable of processing such a gesture when it is made by such an “important” man. He knows or intuits that the New York Times will run headlines like

and that news channels will do their best to align their presentations to the most sympathetic interpretation of what occurred, to the point of editing out the salute entirely when they run it in their broadcasts.

He knows this because for now, Elon Musk and his cohort have won. The inauguration was one long festival of grotesqueries — a parade of tech oligarchs and sore winners grousing about American decline while launching meme coins and setting about dismantling the regulatory state. Four of the five richest men in the world, worth over $1 trillion, beaming in the front row, the fifth already firmly in Trump’s pocket.

“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk famously told Tucker Carlson, perhaps alluding to the many lawsuits and legal troubles he was facing. But Trump did not lose, and now Musk has never been more unfucked in his life. He has triumphed, and so who knows, and who cares? He can go on national television and give a Nazi salute and the national press will collapse in on itself, second-guessing, trying to play fair, even cowering preemptively from reporting on the truth of the moment at all.

The legacy media is dead, Musk is constantly saying on the massive platform he owns, send people links to X so they can see what’s really going on. What at first felt pathetic now appears to be an entirely successful effort to construct a novel vehicle for propaganda that obviates the need to consider the legacy press at all. In turn, a legacy press bled dry by big tech usurping its advertising revenue and dictating the terms of distribution, perhaps recognizing its deep vulnerability, responds by granting Musk the benefit of the doubt.

My former colleague Matt Pearce has written eloquently about “journalism’s fight for survival in a postliterate democracy” and we are observing the effects of that fight going badly in real time right now. That the men and men in charge of the companies most responsible for destroying journalism—Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Picchai, and Musk himself—were in the front row of the inauguration, clapping for Trump, on the same day Musk made his salute, is telling.

As far as they are concerned, they have won. Mark Zuckerberg won’t take any more liberal scolding, he’s firing fact-checkers and moderators, closing down his DEI programs, and opening his platform up for more hate speech, just like Musk did at Twitter, now X. Google’s AI can generate as much toxic slop as it wants, it’s hard to see any Trump agency cracking down if it instructs someone to eat a poisonous mushroom. And Jeff Bezos, the fourth tech titan in the front row seats, can tell his newspapers to spike op-eds supporting the other party, or editorial cartoons criticizing the big man.

The tech oligarchy is here, and so content in their strangulation of the media that they can be unashamed in their fealty. They can cheer in public and give Nazi salutes and what of it. Their institutional capture is complete. Even the Anti-defamation League will look at a Sieg Heil and say, “that’s fine.” Because the tech oligarchs know, from last go round, that, as Astra Taylor has pointed out, the opposition becoming outraged about their offenses will ultimately amount to little. There is no longer any power to be found in yelling, or working the refs, or appealing to norms, if there was any to begin with. Our protests online will be filed away into the nooks of the sprawling platforms they own.

Is Elon Musk a card-carrying Nazi? It doesn’t matter. The salute was a juvenile display of power, one that aptly reflects the stature of the fully ascended tech oligarchy. Musk is the richest man in the world, he is the first buddy; he can transcend any norm, any offense, watch him. Like Trump before him, he can tell everyone to eat shit, and while the media wonders if he meant it, he’s already pointing his attention and posts and cannon of obscene wealth in another direction. He owns the platform that dictates his own reality. He barely had to defend himself, he barely denied it. He’ll probably do it again. Who’s going to stop him?

An internal document from Immigration and Customs Enforcement concludes it would be "impossible" for it to enforce the Laken Riley Act without significantly more resources.

(Image credit: Pool)